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I’m giving this talk at the category theory seminar at U. C. Riverside, as a kind of followup to one by Peter Samuelson on the same subject. My talk will not be recorded, but here are the slides: Spans and the categorified Heisenberg algebra. Abstract. Heisenberg reinvented matrices while discovering quantum mechanics, and the algebra generated by annihilation and creation operators obeying the canonical commutation relations was named after him. …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]This is the Union Pacific Railroad’s Austin Subdivision in central Texas. It’s a busy corridor that moves both freight and passengers north and south between Austin and San Antonio… But it’s mostly freight. Trains run twenty-four-seven here, carrying goods like rock from nearby quarries, cement, vehicles, intermodal freight, and more. So, when Crystal Clear Special Utility District was planning …

I feel like I am both closing in on victory and getting farther away from it, insofar as the last remaining puzzles seem to be stumpers indeed. Not quite succumbing to hints yet but probably next time if I can’t push any farther. From a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, where Ariel and Prospero discuss Ariel previously being trapped in a pine. First, a fairly straightforward bit of …

A few weeks ago, I held a guest lecture in the DSBA 6188: Text Mining and Information Retrieval Class at UNC Charlotte on using large language models (LLMs) for annotation. It was fun because I could expand my previous blog posts on LLM annotation into a full-fledged lecture. This blog post is my (abridged) lecture in written format. You can find the slides here. Finally, thanks to Ryan Wesslen and …

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for reaching out to Bill Wall, and thanks especially to Bill for writing with a series of updates from the Connecticut Trolley Museum, aka Warehouse Point. Bill even sent along a series of photos taken just a couple of weeks ago at CTM. All photos below are taken by Bill Wall except where noted.First, the good news: as shown above, Connecticut Company box motor 2023 has …

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again. Mary Oliver Footnotes Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Selected Essays. Penguin Books, 2016. ISBN: 978-0143130086 Reply …

About a decade ago I stumbled across the cycling world of audax. Long distance endurance riding that was described to me as “…like fast touring”. The word audax intrigued me, hinted at an aesthetic, at something mysterious and foreign. I asked other cycling friends about it but no one really knew much, it was talked about in a “here be monsters” kind of way, all third hand rumours about mudguard …

Ernest Shackleton embarked on four journeys to the Antarctic in his lifetime, and his aptly-named Endurance expedition was his third and perhaps most challenging. South (1919) is the first printing of his account of the expedition, which may have failed in its mission, but has since been remembered as a feat of great fortitude, survival, and leadership. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917 Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was the last …

I find myself in the position of too much to do at the moment, to the point where I spent near on12 hours standing today working on the 009 project. Bliss some would say, but only from the position of having a choice. There is a 16t mineral on the bench which is headed for Rhiw2 that needs finishing, not to mention a runner wagon conversion promised for an RM …

Ebony Magazine, via the New York Times, 1991. Eunice Johnson is in pink It is hard to overestimate the contribution of Eunice Johnson (1916-2010) to African American fashion in the United States. She and her husband were the founders of Ebony and Jet. Although she worked as secretary and treasurer for the Johnson Publishing Company, early on she began to follow her passion for couture fashion. Rather than keeping that …

Philosopher Nic Bommarito looks at George Herriman's early 20th century comic Krazy Kat Continue reading → The post Nic Bommarito on Krazy Kat appeared first on Aesthetics for Birds.

By Dr Luke Truxal Editorial note: On 26 January 2024, Apple TV+ launched the much-anticipated series Masters of the Air. This series follows the actions of the US 100th Bomb Group during the Combined Bomber Offensive in the Second World War. As the series is being aired, our Book Reviews Editor, Dr Luke Truxal, the … Continue reading #FilmReview – Masters of the Air, Episode Four →

Val Town is a neat service for hosting short server-side JavaScript programs online - reminiscent of a combination of Glitch and Observable Notebooks. Today I figured out how to use it to run an hourly task (a "Val") that fetches data from an Atom feed, parses it and then submits the resulting parsed data to a table running on Datasette Cloud via the Datasette JSON write API. Configuring secrets in …

Respected thesp tragically descends into a unique kind of dementia. (via actress Kika Markham's memoir of life with actor-husband and left-wing activist Corin Redgrave, here reviewed by ultra-thesp Simon Callow)"... When he was playing Pericles at the Globe, he had a major heart attack, while delivering a speech in Basildon on behalf of some evicted Travellers. He recovered physically, but never fully mentally... Though Redgrave could still speak, his memory …

Essay question Write a 2000 word essay on the following topic... Critically discuss the choices that you have made in relation to your communication techniques and style within the context of specific trauma-informed events or organisational change at work. You should draw on illustrative examples from practice to support or refute particular models and/or theoretical frameworks. Introduction Government has been working through Digital transformation for many years and as part …